Fearless, inventive, persistent, beautiful,
or just plain badass—here are some of the living authors who shake us awake,
challenge our ideas of who we are, embolden our actions, and, above all,
inspire us to live life more fully and creatively. Add your favorites to the
list in the comments section below.

Chinua
Achebe
The best-selling Nigerian novelist sets
universal tales of personal and moral struggle in the context of the tragic
drama of colonization.

André Aciman
An uprooted Alexandrian
Jew, Aciman is a writer whose careful reflections, couched in dense and
unapologetic prose, unfurl like lifelines flung out to all the world's
wanderers.

Uwem
Akpan
His is the perfect story line: Jesuit priest
from Nigeria becomes a best-selling, Oprah-chosen author. "I was inspired to
write by the people who sit around my village church to share palm wine after
Sunday Mass, by the Bible, and by the humor and endurance of the poor," he
writes on his Web site.

Elizabeth
Alexander
There was too much chatter about the quality
of the poem. What matters is that she was up there reading it—a poem!—on the
biggest and most inspiring stage in recent history.

Aharon Appelfeld
As William Giraldi wrote, he is "a man for whom
language is dangerous, a man who measures every word because every word is
sacred."

John
Ashbery
One of the best and most enduring poets that
this country is lucky enough to have. Period.

Alison
Bechdel
The graphic memoirist shows us that perhaps
the truest way to make sense of memory is by investigating the pictures of our
past (both physical and mental).

T.
C. Boyle
He's like Santa Claus, only thinner. You can
count on a damn good book of fiction under the tree every year.

Anne
Carson
She was bending genres like silly straws long
before it was fashionable or commercially successful to do so. Plus, she's
probably the smartest author we know.

Kang Chol-Hwan
His memoir,
The Aquariums of Pyongyang, was the first account of North Korea's gulag
system by someone who had survived it.

Susanna Clarke
She took one of the
staples of fantasy writing, the magician, and turned it into a high literary
epic, removing Jonathan Strange
and Mr. Norrell from the confines of genre entirely.

Billy Collins
He's made accessible a dirty word by
celebrating the poetic pleasures and small comforts of ordinary life in a way
that encourages us to celebrate them too.

Joan
Didion
Check for the pulse of anyone who wasn't deeply moved by The Year of
Magical Thinking. Didion's simple, unsentimental prose is
pure inspirational power.

Katherine Dunn
It's been more than
twenty years since she introduced us to Arturo the Aquaboy, Ephy and Elly the
twins, and Oly the albino hunchback, but we'll gladly wait another twenty for
anything approaching the genius of Geek
Love.

Cornelius
Eady and Toi Derricotte
Two poets, two words: Cave Canem. The fact
that they have eleven poetry collections between them is icing on the cake.

Dave
Eggers
From A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to McSweeney's
to 826 National to Where the Wild Things Are. He might just be the hardest-working writer in publishing.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The last Bohemian. A
cofounder of City Lights Bookstore. Publisher of Allen Ginsberg's Howl—and defendant in the
obscenity trial that ensued. Author of A
Coney Island of the Mind. His audience treats him like a rock star.
Because he is one.

Donald
Hall
The image of the eighty-one-year-old on the
cover of Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in
Poetry pretty much says it all.

Kathryn Harrison
It takes courage to
write The Kiss. Plain
and simple.

Brenda Hillman
Reminds us that the language we use when ordering a sandwich
is also the language we use to make art. Her environmental concerns prove
writers can offer more than just aesthetic pleasure.

Duong
Thu Huong
A former member of the Vietnamese Communist
Party, Duong, especially in No Man's Land, reassures us that beauty tends to be oblivious to the threats of thugs.

Philip Levine
He conveys and
memorializes the struggles of the American working class in a way that is
authentic, heartfelt, and all too rare in contemporary poetry.

Jill
Magi
Her grassroots efforts to build community
through a micropublishing model prove that you don't need a lot of money to
make an impact.

Gabriel García Márquez
He makes the most
magical of circumstances believable. And this nonsense that he's finished with
writing? Don't believe it.

Cormac
McCarthy
He made it okay for literary snobs to read
bloody westerns and postapocalyptic thrillers.

Pat Mora
The feminist poet and
founder of Día de los Niños/Día de los Libros is also an energetic advocate in
the bilingual community.

Toni
Morrison
A portrait of strength and beauty, the 1993
Nobel laureate writes utterly compelling novels about the whole arc of American
experience.

Haruki Murakami
He consistently
demonstrates how far the narrative form can bend and proves that a story with
surrealist tendencies can be both moving and compelling.

Barack Obama
Let's never forget that
our first African American president is also a best-selling author.

Tim
O'Brien
In The Things
They Carried, he gave us the ultimate meditation on war,
memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

Lucia
Perillo
Stares down multiple sclerosis and laughs in
its face. Plus, anyone who has the guts to title a book of poems Inseminating the Elephant has our vote.

Salvador Plascencia
Reminiscent of another
inspirational figure, Roberto Bolaño, Plascencia alters our experience of the
text and challenges our associations of symbol and meaning by incorporating
drawings, figures, and text objects into his writing.

Reynolds Price
The Southern poet,
novelist, and memoirist has done some of his best work after becoming a
paraplegic following surgery in the 1980s to remove a spinal cord tumor.

Thomas Pynchon
He's like Proust. We
could live our whole lives and never read Gravity's
Rainbow...and still be inspired by it.

David
Rhodes
He may have been down, but he's never been
out. The author of Driftless still has a glimmer in his eye when he talks about motorcycles.

Marilynne
Robinson
She proves that great art takes time. With
the publication of Gilead, we were
reminded that twenty-four years isn't too long to wait for a novel.

Salman
Rushdie
Possession of The
Satanic Verses will still get you arrested in much of the
Muslim world. It's probably worth it.

Kay
Ryan
The quietness and measured quality of her
poetry also informs her lifestyle: As both a runner and cyclist, she
establishes a balance between the heady work of writing and the need of the
body to do its own work.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz
His novels contain
heartbreakingly honest and unsentimental portraits of people struggling with
such traumas as alcoholism and sexual molestation.

J. D. Salinger
He found a way to write
characters, dialogue, and scenes that seem effortless. And he's managed to stay
hidden for decades—how is that even possible in the twenty-first century?

Frederick
Seidel
Sure he's filthy rich, but the man knows how
to spend his money. He owns four Ducati motorcycles and he writes poems about
them (probably while wearing a suit).

Floyd
Skloot
Despite virus-induced brain damage, he writes
with surprising tenderness and candor about recreating a life for himself and,
in the process, makes us think about our own.

Wole Soyinka
The first black writer
to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, he's written in nearly ever genre while
relentlessly pursuing freedom in his homeland of Nigeria.

Ruth
Stone
Six years ago, when she was a mere
eighty-nine years old, the poet was quoted in our pages as saying, "You have to
allow yourself to take joy. Otherwise, you're no good to anyone."

Wisława
Szymborska
The most famous living poet in Poland proves
that quality is more important than quantity. The eighty-six-year-old Nobel
laureate has published no more than 250 poems.

Gay Talese
The New Journalism.

Elie Wiesel
"I was the accuser, God
the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world
without God and without man." —from the Nobel Peace Prize winner's memoir Night.

C.
D. Wright
She's a true original, who manages to be odd, beautiful,
tough as nails, and wonderfully inventive all in the same poetic line.

Authors who would have
made the list had we compiled it a little over a year ago: Jim Carroll, Frank McCourt, Reginald Shepherd, John Updike, David Foster Wallace.

We’ve shared our list. Now we want to hear from you: Which authors inspire you most?